SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. — One thing about the Triple Crown: Fans do not get cheated, at least when it comes to the number of races on the big day.
Just as Churchill Downs did for the Kentucky Derby and Laurel Park did two weeks later for the Preakness, Saratoga Race Course has scheduled 14 races Saturday, highlighted by the Belmont Stakes. It’s the third and final year the Belmont will be run at the upstate New York track while Belmont Park is being rebuilt.
While Laurel started its card at 7:30 a.m. PDT, the Saratoga card follows Churchill’s schedule and begins at 8 a.m. PDT, or 11 a.m. on the East Coast. And, just like the other two headline races, the Belmont is scheduled to start at 4:04 p.m. PDT, or 7:04 p.m. EDT.
It will be the 13th race of the day, with official post time listed at four minutes past the hour.
The biggest difference Saturday from the Derby and Preakness is where fans can watch the races. Fox, not NBC, has the rights to the Belmont.
The first seven races can be seen on FS2 as part of the New York Racing Assn.’s regular “America’s Day at the Races” program, which starts at 7:30 a.m. PDT and continues until noon. The eighth race, at 12:25 p.m. PDT, also will be covered by that crew but will air on Fox.
The network’s official Belmont show begins at 1 p.m. and continues until 4:30. Curt Menefee again is the host, with analysts Tom Amoss and Richard Migliore, plus handicappers Jonathan Kinchen and Chris Fallica, with other contributors such as Charissa Thompson and Tom Rinaldi.
Thompson also will host an alternate telecast geared for horseplayers from 1-4:30 on FS1.
The last of Belmont’s 14 races is set to begin just past 5 p.m. PDT, or 8 p.m. in the East. But don’t worry … FS2 will carry that and it won’t interrupt the Belmont Stakes post-race coverage.
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. — The Belmont Stakes is less than 34 hours away, and Cherie DeVaux is feeling stressed.
Not about the race. DeVaux has done what she can do to prepare her 3-year-old colt, Golden Tempo, for Saturday’s third leg of the Triple Crown. Questions about post position, track bias, even the increasing threat of potentially severe thunderstorms before the evening post time (4:04 PDT, Fox) are brushed aside because, as she said, those are all out of a trainer’s control.
No, it’s her makeup bag.
She forgot to bring it with her to Saratoga Race Course and she has a Fox Sports TV interview scheduled right after she finishes speaking with a reporter inside her small office adjacent to Barn 83.
“I have to be on national TV, and I have not a stitch of makeup on right now, all the while having to try to make sure I enter my horses and not forget and mess that up too badly,” DeVaux said, smiling. “So it’s been a lot.”
Golden Tempo’s trainer Cherie DeVaux kisses a trophy after winning the Kentucky Derby.
(Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
The coolest?
“We won the Derby,” she said. “I don’t know if there’s anything cooler than that.
“There have been a lot of really neat opportunities,” she added. “A lot of different people have reached out. But you know, just the whole experience itself.”
Winning the Derby changes anyone’s life, but it’s magnified when you make history, as DeVaux did by becoming the first female trainer to win the world’s most famous horse race. It began a whirlwind that included more than 65 TV interviews and dozens upon dozens of text messages and phone calls.
And, truthfully, there was one experience that, for a college softball player and lifelong New York Yankees fan, exceeded the others.
“I did get to throw the first pitch out at a Yankees game, which I thought was amazing,” DeVaux said. “To stand on the field and look at the cheap seats [where I sat] when I was a kid. … And I’ve had much better seats in recent times, but to really sit there and have that dichotomy of that was where you started and this is where you are, was really a profound feeling.”
Kentucky Derby winning trainer Cherie DeVaux and jockey Jose Ortiz throw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium on May 7.
(Ishika Samant / Getty Images)
Technically she’s back home for the Belmont, which is being run at Saratoga for the third and final year while Belmont Park is rebuilt. But she has few memories of Saratoga as a child; the family moved to Florida when she was 9 and she lived there until she was 19. Much of her family, including her parents and several siblings, live in the area, though, and DeVaux, who spends most of the year in Kentucky, said she’s been able to enjoy some time with them this week.
The big question is whether her large cheering section will be able to celebrate another victory. Handicappers are more than a bit pessimistic. Saturday’s Daily Racing Form has 1-2-3-4 selections by 19 experts, and not one selected Golden Tempo. Just two picked him second and five had him third. The consensus was he would not finish in the top four.
His chances in Kentucky were aided by a fast pace that tired out the front-runners, and on paper the Belmont figures to be run at a more moderate pace, which doesn’t always help a late-running horse. But he is a colt who relishes the distance and he has improved his Beyer Speed Figure with every start.
DeVaux is excited for the race, obviously, but she’s also eager for this “season” to end. She knows life will never be the same as it was before May 2, but she’d like to slow down a bit, in part, so she can enjoy the feeling of winning the Derby.
“I couldn’t prepare myself,” said DeVaux, who had never had a Derby starter. “I didn’t really think about winning the race. I thought Golden Tempo was going to run really well. I thought he would hit the board, … but I never allowed myself to think that he would win and what that would look like.
“And I’m one of those people I want to think about, you know, we win the race, what does that look like? But I was just so excited to be at the Derby and I wanted to just really be present, that it really didn’t cross my mind what would happen if we won the race.”
Golden Tempo’s trainer Cherie DeVaux holds her nephew while speaking to reporters after winning the Kentucky Derby on May 2.
(Andy Lyons / Getty Images)
Others weren’t prepared, either. DeVaux was carrying one of her nephews on her hip immediately after the Derby, and some people watching on TV immediately praised her for being a working mom. One problem: She doesn’t have children of her own (her husband has full custody of a teenage girl).
“Can I just not be a really good horse trainer that did something really profound and amazing in a short amount of time after I had to work my rear end off for it?” DeVaux said. “Like, why can’t that just be the story?”
Etc.
The Belmont is the 13th race on a 14-race card that begins at 8 a.m. PDT. The first seven races will be on FS2 before coverage shifts to Fox at noon (the Belmont show starts at 1). A separate handicapping-oriented show will air from 1-4:30 p.m. on FS1.
There are five Grade 1 races scheduled, including Bob Baffert’s Nysos against Michael McCarthy’s Journalism in the Met Mile (2:32 p.m.) and Baffert’s Crude Velocity against DeVaux’s Englishman in the Woody Stephens (1:52 p.m.). The Belmont is slated to start at about 4:10 p.m.
Brian Kahn was a teenager living in the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s, which meant at 5:30 p.m. every weekday he did what any true sports fan did at that time.
He listened to the radio.
“Is it true? … I am the king … Aw, blow it out! … The dreaded 6 o’clock tone …”
“I had a buddy and his dad used to listen to Jim Healy a lot,” Kahn recalled, “and I caught onto it and loved it and just religiously listened to it every day. He’d talk about horse racing all the time and I knew nothing about it.
“It caught my interest somehow.”
Little did 15-year-old Brian Kahn know that enjoying odd sound effects and rants from Tommy Lasorda and Lee Elia would someday lead him to breeding one of the 20 horses that will start in Saturday’s Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs (3:57 p.m. PDT, NBC). The Puma, who is 10-1 on the morning line, is a son of Eve of War, a mare Kahn owns with Hidden Brook Farm in Paris, Ky.
After hearing Healy talk about the horses, Kahn began watching the race replays each night on TV. His cousin started taking him to Santa Anita, where he saw Spectacular Bid win the 1980 Strub Stakes in world record time for 1¼ miles and later followed such stars as John Henry.
“It was just so dynamic back then, being at Santa Anita for the big days and there would be 60,000 or 70,000 people there,” he said. “It was amazing.”
Brian Kahn stands alongside a 2026 foal, the daugher of Maximus Mischief, at Hidden Brook Farm in Paris, Ky.
(Courtesy of Brian Kahn)
Kahn, 61, went to Birmingham High School and USC, and decided he wanted to have a career in horse racing. He worked as a hot walker for some trainers, including Gary Jones, read everything about the sport and business he could and learned that unless he wanted to get up at 4 a.m. and be a trainer, he needed to move to Kentucky.
Duncan Taylor from Taylor Made Farm offered him a job, and Kahn got in his car and drove more than 2,100 miles to Nicholasville, Ky., just outside Lexington.
He started working with horses but eventually Taylor thought Kahn was more suited to client relations, or “hustling business” for the farm by convincing owners to board their mares at Taylor Made or sell them.
It was a good beginning, but after three years, Kahn missed California.
“I really should have stayed in Lexington and made a life there for myself, but I ended up coming back,” he said. “But I was able to do business for them from out here.”
Kahn, who lives by the beach in Venice, enjoyed his first major success with Miatuschka, a mare he bought with Taylor Made in the mid-1990s and later sold for $380,000, making “a nice profit.”
“I’ve been doing that ever since,” Kahn said.
Brian Kahn, left; Bryan Cross, center; and Dan Hall are his partners owning Eve at War, the mother of The Puma. They gathered at Hidden Brook Farm in Paris, Ky.
Not every sale works out like that, but Kahn has done well enough to make this his career. He looks to buy fillies and mares that are good broodmare prospects, then either resells them or breeds them and sells the foal.
For the colt that turned out to be The Puma, Kahn thought Eve of War — a daughter of Declaration of War, who was a multiple Grade 1-winner in Europe — had great promise after winning a maiden race. Her career never really took off like he thought, but Kahn believed she would be a good broodmare. When she was consigned to a sale in the summer of 2021, he bought her with Hidden Brook for $135,000.
Kahn’s idea was to breed her to Charlatan, who won the Arkansas Derby and Malibu Stakes for Bob Baffert in 2020. But Sergio de Sousa, managing partner at Hidden Brook, suggested Essential Quality, a champion colt at 2 and 3 at the start of this decade.
As a yearling, the colt didn’t meet his reserve price of $95,000, so Kahn and Hidden Brook pointed him to a 2-year-old in training sale last year at Ocala. He brought a price of $150,000, still less than Kahn hoped. But they still own Eve of War, whose value has increased with the progress of The Puma, and she has a yearling colt by Nyquist, a weanling colt by Practical Joke and this year was bred to Sierra Leone.
Under the care of trainer Gustavo Delgado, who won the Derby two years ago with Mage, The Puma has won only once in four starts, but that victory came in the Tampa Bay Derby. He also was second in the Florida Derby, losing to Commandment by a nose.
And now he’s in the Kentucky Derby. Kahn, who spends three to four months a year in Lexington, was there last week but will be home Saturday, watching by himself.
“To have a Derby horse … it’s very significant for me and very exciting,” he said. “Off the charts exciting.”
Silent Tactic scratched
Silent Tactic, second in the Rebel and Arkansas Derby, has been scratched from the Derby with a bruised foot. That moves Great White from the also-eligible list into the field of 20, breaking from the outside post position. Horses who were drawn from 14-20 will move inside by one spot.
Great White, a son of Violence, won the John Battaglia Memorial Stakes in February over the synthetic surface at Turfway Park, but in his first (and only) career start on dirt, he was a distant fifth in the Blue Grass at Keeneland.
